He had an electrician father, Walter, whom he obviously adored and a mother, Annabel, who treated him kindly but also scared him with her anger, especially once she became an alcoholic, a drinking problem that Ebert himself would share and eventually conquer.Ī lifelong liberal, Ebert had dreamed of being a feisty newspaper columnist like Mike Royko. He was born 69 years ago in Urbana, Illinois, and enjoyed a classic middle-American childhood, idyllic but tinged with darkness. The book is chatty, upbeat and structurally loose - which is to say that it sounds exactly like Roger Ebert. This pleasure comes through in his new memoir, "Life Itself." Perhaps goaded into existence by the cancer that has assailed him in recent years, it tells the life story of the man with the most famous thumb in America, pausing along the way to offer the author's views on everything from the glories of black-and-white cinematography to the existence of God to the comedy of being fat. That rarest of creatures, a film critic who everyone knows, he really enjoys being Roger Ebert. JOHN POWERS, BYLINE: You can divide famous people into two broad categories: those who find fame a burden and those who take it like a tonic. We're going to start with a piece John recorded about Ebert in September 2011, after the publication of Ebert's memoir "Life Itself." And we'll hear excerpts of onstage interviews Ebert conducted with Martin Scorsese and Francis Coppola about two of Ebert's favorite films, "Raging Bull" and "Apocalypse Now." Our critic-at-large John Powers says that Ebert will be remembered for his enthusiasm, his openness, his generosity to filmmakers and to his fellow critics, and for his canny knack of taking his work into new media. We're going to listen back to an interview with Ebert, as well as an interview with Ebert and Siskel. But he kept writing about films on his blog and social media, reaching a big and appreciative audience.
His life and his body had already been dramatically altered by cancer of the thyroid, salivary glands and chin, which was first diagnosed in 2002. Ebert died yesterday at the age of 70, just a few days after blogging that a painful fracture that had made it difficult to walk was diagnosed as cancer. GROSS: That's how Roger Ebert and his rival Chicago film critic the late Gene Siskel used to introduce each other on their PBS program "Sneak Previews," the show that made them famous in the late '70s. GENE SISKEL: And this is Roger Ebert, film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times. ROGER EBERT: Across the aisle from me, Gene Siskel, film critic of the Chicago Tribune.
Today, we remember film critic Roger Ebert.
0 kommentar(er)
